Impulse purchase feels right this time

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

My friend Anne and I play this game: We're in a fancy store, maybe an art gallery or pricey boutique, and our mission is to pick out the one thing we would buy if we could buy anything — price and need and size (where would we put that?) irrelevant. It's all about wants, and it's a fun game to play because at the end of the day, we have no guilt. No maxed out credit cards, no buyer's remorse, nothing to regret.

We go to dinner and toast our restraint.

If Anne had been with me last week when I went to Costco to pick up $1.88 worth of photos, I would not now have a 46-inch/116.8-centimeter indoor/outdoor Santa sitting on my front stoop. I would have been judicious. I would have played the one-thing-you-would-buy game, yearned a little, well maybe a lot, but then gone home and bought some fresh garland at the garden center down the street. But alone, I succumbed. I took one look at Santa's cheery face and his sack full of toys and beelined it to the checkout to find someone who could help me fit him into my car. Then I fa-la-laahed between mea culpas all the way home.

This is how I've since rationalized the purchase of an essentially useless object. First, I've convinced myself that I have heeded my father's words. "You're a long time dead," he told me every day that I walked by a $50 stuffed cow, which was in the window of a hospital gift shop. He was in the hospital where the gift shop was. He was dying. And he said: "If you want the cow, you should get the cow. Does it make you happy? Will spending $50 leave you destitute? Buy the cow."

The day it was marked down to $40, I did what he told me and carried the giant Guernsey up to his room. "Nice cow," he said. And smiled. "Nice Santa," I imagined him saying as I whipped out my credit card and the Costco people loaded the giant Santa onto a gurney. And I smiled.

Also, like the cow, which countless children have sat on and ridden like a horse around my house, the Santa was a bargain, too, a "7" at the end of his price tag and not a 9, Costco code for a mark-down. A second reason to buy him.

Number three: I could have spent the money and bought a fancy new party dress. Or fancy new shoes, with buckles, like my friend Elaine bought a few weeks ago. Or a fancy designer pocketbook like my friend Maureen has. Or face cream — which I truly do need — but the jars are so teeny and face cream isn't doing the trick these days, anyway. But Santa is. He's big and happy-looking and makes me happy. And he is so much more bang for the buck.

Number four: The fresh garland for the front door? It's expensive, it's hard to hang, and to do a good job, it should be strung with lights and, really, it needs red ribbons, too. And, unlike my fiberglass Santa, it will not be around to festoon the entryway next year.

Finally, isn't Christmas, at least the commercial haul-out-the-holly part, about wants, not needs? Santa doesn't say, "Have you been a good little girl? Yes? Well then, what do you need for Christmas?" He says, "What do you want?"

I want Santa by the front door, welcoming people, toys in his sack and a merry “Ho-ho-ho!” in his eyes and